Pedagogy of Freedom is a stirring culmination of Paulo Freire’s life work. It is in no way a conclusion or a summation: it is a text that urges its readers to become, to reach towards still untapped possibility. The themes of Freire’s earlier writing are extended here into thoughtful explorations of ethics and democracy and the ways in which they may release a sense of agency in the long exploited and cruelly silenced. Moreover, he has new things to say about ideology and freedom in a world marked by a threatening ‘globalization’ and an unprecedented manipulation by media. As before, he speaks of ‘passion,’ ‘love,’ and ‘caring;’ and, each time he does so, it is as if his hand grasps each one of our shoulders, urging us on and on.

The idea behind an diversity-based cooperative society is that wealth is redistributed in order to let every identity to have the possibility to fulfill its potential. This idea has been the base of democracies, communist and socialist systems, and capitalist-liberal ones. Capitalism accuses communism and socialism to be fake and to destroy the individual dignity. Socialism and communism instead point out that capitalism is greedy and the system brings to in-equivalence. And they're both right.

French Parliament has voted in favor of a law that could revolutionize their food system.

The upper chamber of France’s parliament has passed a law requiring all of the nation’s “collective restaurants” (school cafeterias, hospital cafeterias, senior living communities, prisons and other state institutions) to source at least 40 percent of their food locally. The proposal will need to be approved by the French Senate before it becomes law.

In addition to being locally sourced, the food served must be in season, organically grown and certified ecologically sustainable.

While the law does not have a set definition of “local”, different recommendations will be given depending on the product and the geographical area. Currently, those recommendations are estimated to be about a 30-kilometer radius (around 19 miles) for fruit and vegetables and a 100-kilometer radius (about 63 miles) for foods that need processing before consumption (i.e. meat, grains).

The ultimate goal of the law, according to the text, is to restructure the food system in France, stimulate local economies, and shorten the food supply chain to a minimum...

New Age transpersonalism leans toward a restrictive non-relational spirituality because of its historical affirmation of individualism and transcendence. Relational spirituality (which is central to the emerging participatory-paradigm) swims against strong and popular currents in New Age-transpersonal thinking, belief, and practice which tend to see spirituality as an individual, personal, ?inner‘ pursuit (often) into Eastern/Oriental non-dualism …

Like the natural world itself, the community credit landscape is diverse and dynamic and will never be fixed in a single pattern. That said, it is possible to recognize three distinct cultures that have emerged among these systems so far.

Each of these groups organizes somewhat differently and uses different systems, but they’re all premised on the same basic principle of mutual credit exchange.

A community credit facility results any time a group of people or organizations comes together and agrees to directly issue credit to each other for their own goods and services. (Some groups have a different way of describing this, but the result is the same.)

This is usually called mutual credit, and it’s the most democratic form of credit creation: we issue credit ourselves backed by our own promises to redeem it in the future. Organize these promises together, and you’ve got a bottom-up credit facility...

Professor Harold Haas and his team have essentially unlocked what is known as "Li-Fi," or Light Fidelity and are using simple LED light sources to power their internet and deliver the information in one packet.

“The potential expansion to the internet is massive and my aspiration is that this broadband solar panel receiver technology for Li-Fi will help solve the challenges of the digital divide throughout the world," Haas says.

A prominent economist has a radical proposal for stimulating the economy: just add money to everyone’s bank account. It is crazy enough to work?

Adair Turner, an academic, policymaker, and member of the House of Lords, has another idea. In his new book, “Between Debt and the Devil: Money, Credit, and Fixing Global Finance” (Princeton), Lord Turner argues that countries facing the predicament of onerous debts, low interest rates, and slow growth should consider a radical but alluringly simple option: create more money and hand it out to people.

“A government could, for instance, pay $1000 to all citizens by electronic transfer to their commercial bank deposit accounts,” Turner writes. People could spend the money as they saw fit: on food, clothes, household goods, vacations, drinking binges—anything they liked. Demand across the economy would get a boost, Turner notes, “and the extent of that stimulus would be broadly proportional to the value of new money created.”

The figure of a thousand dollars is meant to be strictly illustrative. It could just as easily be five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars—however much was needed to drag the economy out of the doldrums

Scientists from Columbia University’s Center for Radiological Research have shown that a narrow wavelength of ultraviolet light safely killed drug-resistant MRSA bacteria in mice, suggesting its potential to reduce surgical site infections.

A paper just published by PLOS ONE describes how the Columbia team found that a particular wavelength of UV light known as “far-UVC” (in this instance, 207 nanometers) is not only as effective as conventional germicidal UV light in killing MRSA, as shown in their previously published study, but also shows for the first time that, unlike conventional germicidal UV, far-UVC does not cause biological damage to exposed skin.

Meshnet networks, or meshnets, are a form of intranet that doesn’t require a central router point. Instead of emitting from a single point, they’re distributed across an entire system of nodes. Accessing one is free—and doesn’t require the services of a telecom.

Lau had spent the previous summer chatting with other meshnet enthusiasts in Europe, trying to figure out the best way to set up routers across the city. He suggested it was time to give it a try in Toronto. What grew out of Lau and Iantorno’s meeting, four months ago now, was a plan to build a meshnet in this city—one where users wouldn’t need to worry about eavesdroppers, because it would be encrypted.

When it’s finished, Toronto’s first free-to-use meshnet should provide an accessible and secure internet community, maintained by locals keen on becoming digitally self-sufficient. Those early adopters could reshape our relationship to internet providers, and cut monthly rates out of the picture.

You’re going to want to sit down for this one. I’ve had some folks burst into tears in horror when I passed along this information before.

Wheat harvest protocol in the United States is to drench the wheat fields with Roundup several days before the combine harvesters work through the fields as withered, dead wheat plants are less taxing on the farm equipment and allows for an earlier, easier and bigger harvest

Pre-harvest application of the herbicide Roundup or other herbicides containing the deadly active ingredient glyphosate to wheat and barley as a desiccant was suggested as early as 1980. It has since become routine over the past 15 years and is used as a drying agent 7-10 days before harvest within the conventional farming community.

Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat. Eating “complex carbohydrates,” rather than sugars, is a reasonable way to promote obesity. Eating starch, by increasing insulin and lowering the blood sugar, stimulates the appetite, causing a person to eat more, so the effect on fat production becomes much larger than when equal amounts of sugar and starch are eaten. The obesity itself then becomes an additional physiological factor; the fat cells create something analogous to an inflammatory state. There isn't anything wrong with a high carbohydrate diet, and even a high starch diet isn't necessarily incompatible with good health, but when better foods are available they should be used instead of starches. For example, fruits have many advantages over grains, besides the difference between sugar and starch. Bread and pasta consumption are strongly associated with the occurrence of diabetes, fruit consumption has a strong inverse association.http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml

Dr Ray Peat also says...After decades of “education” to promote eating starchy foods, obesity is a bigger problem than ever, and more people are dying of diabetes than previously. The age-specific incidence of most cancers is increasing, too, and there is evidence that starch, such as pasta, contributes to breast cancer, and possibly other types of cancer.

The epidemiology would appear to suggest that complex carbohydrates cause diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. If the glycemic index is viewed in terms of the theory that hyperglycemia, by way of “glucotoxicity,” causes the destruction of proteins by glycation, which is seen in diabetes and old age, that might seem simple and obvious.

Many of our most commonly used drugs, from painkillers to antidepressants, are dangerous and are killing us off in large numbers, says a leading researcher visiting Australia next week.

Peter Gotzsche, a co-founder of the Cochrane Collaboration, the world's foremost body in assessing medical evidence, arrives in Australia on Monday for a whirlwind speaking tour warning Australians about their use of prescription medications.

He estimates that 100,000 people in the United States alone die each year from the side-effects of correctly used drugs. Similar figures are not available in Australia, although the Australian Bureau of Statistics estimates that 3000 people died after complications with medical and surgical care in 2012.

"It's remarkable that nobody raises an eyebrow when we kill so many of our own citizens with drugs," Professor Gotzsche, who heads the Nordic Cochrane Centre, told Fairfax Media ahead of his visit.

Scary but so true - as a registered nurse I have seen the negative effects of prescription drugs on health over and over and over again...of course they have their place sometimes, and in emergencies they can save lives. For most long term prescription drugs there is a price somewhere else in the body. I lost my father last year, and I know in my heart of hearts that his total compliance with medication prescribed for him by his well intentioned doctor, finally led to the complications which ended his life.

A doctor once told me a true story about a woman he knew in a nursing home that was dying - the whole family were called to be with her, and medication was ceased while they waited for her to die. For a few days she got worse each day and then better, and better, and better. So much so that she was able to leave the nursing home and go to live with family!!

Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have sequenced the genome of the nearly indestructible tardigrade, the only animal known to survive the extreme environment of outer space, and found something they never expected: that they get a huge chunk of their genome - nearly one-sixth or 17.5 percent - from foreign DNA.

"We had no idea that an animal genome could be composed of so much foreign DNA," said co-author Bob Goldstein, faculty in the biology department in UNC's College of Arts and Sciences. "We knew many animals acquire foreign genes, but we had no idea that it happens to this degree."

"We think of the tree of life, with genetic material passing vertically from mom and dad," said Boothby. "But with horizontal gene transfer becoming more widely accepted and more well known, at least in certain organisms, it is beginning to change the way we think about evolution and inheritance of genetic material and the stability of genomes. So instead of thinking of the tree of life, we can think about the web of life and genetic material crossing from branch to branch. So it's exciting. We are beginning to adjust our understanding of how evolution works."

Governance, business, and learning models are moving from centralized control to network-centric foundations.

For instance, coalition governments are increasing in frequency, businesses are organizing in value networks, and collaborative and connected learning is becoming widespread.

In these cases, collaboration (working for a common objective) and cooperation (sharing freely without direct reciprocity) flow both ways.

The networked organization trinity is based on the Triple-A organization, as proposed by Valdis Krebs. It is structured to take advantage of the complexity and noisiness of social networks, allowing information to flow as freely as possible, and affording workers the space to make sense of it and share their experiences and knowledge.

The underlying concept of the trinity model is that organizations and their people are members of many different types of networks, communities of practice, and close-knit collaborative work teams.

Co-operatives are one face of a networked society, but there must also be freedom to act and experiment on an individual level and in small, informal groups, which will allow us to bring what we learn into the network...

Under the Swiss Federal Constitution, if a petition gathers at least 100,000 signatures within 18 months, a referendum is held on the issue a few years later.

“In a nutshell, the proposal extends the Swiss Federation’s existing exclusive right to create coins and notes, to also include deposits.With the full power of new money creation exclusively in the hands of the Swiss National Bank, the commercial banks would no longer have the power to create money through lending.

The Swiss National Bank’s primary role becomes the management of the money supply relative to the productive economy, while the decision concerning how new money is introduced debt free into the economy would reside with the government”, reads the official website of the initiative.

In Switzerland, referendums are usually organised 3 to 5 years after a popular initiative succeeds. The proposals first have to be debated by the Federal government and Parliament. In case the Parliament decides to adopt a proposal into law immediately, the organisers of the initiative have the right to renounce the referendum, hence speeding up the implementation of the proposal. However, this is very rare case, as most initiatives are ultimately submitted to a nationwide referendum.

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